Something needed to be done. I have become addicted to constant news, updates, the latest gadgets, upgrades, and rumors. I spend way more time reading tips and techniques for improving my photography than I actually spend photographing things. Reading tech blogs does nothing but make me crave the newest gadgets and gizmos. Most of all, I fell prey to my uncontrollable desire to move any progress bar I am given to completion. No matter how much time I spend reading stories, looking at pictures, and skimming headlines, there were always more unread items waiting. If I did actually finish, there would be more in 30 minutes or less. It never stopped. According to Google Reader, my dealer of choice, since October 11, 2006 I have read 285, 079 items. In the last month along I have read 3,599 items. Until today, I had 81 RSS feeds that I was following completely, and even that is down from a much larger number 6 months ago. But no more, I have deleted all but a very few, 3 per week at the most, feeds. Not completely ready to cut ties, I saved off by big list of feeds for now, but here’s hoping that it stays stored away.
This is in addition to a social networking “friend” purge I did a couple months ago. There too I realized I was spending completely unnecesary time being updating on the lives of people that I had had zero contact with for years, or who I had only fleeting contact with but had ended up in the perpetual internet connection. There again, I said, no more deleted 100-150 “friends” and have been all the happier since. I am not wasting the time I was before, and I am less distracted in dealing with the people I actual know and care about.
Let see what productive things I can do now.
There is something I am noticing in this political cycle that is really starting to annoy me. It might have been around before, but this is the first time I have really noticed it. Go and watch TV news outlets and take notice of what they are talking about. You will begin to notice that they are not actually ever talking about the qualifications or stances of the candidates. They never really get around to talking about exactly what the candidates are planning on doing for the economy or foreign relations or education. What we hear from the TV news outlets is how people are going to respond to their stances. They don’t talk about what McCain wants to do for the energy crysis. They talk about how rural Americans as opposed to senior citizen women as opposed to young white collar workers perceive McCain’s stance on dealing with energy. How do we expect to properly elect the right candidate when we aren’t ever hearing anything about who the candidates really are?
Add to this the fact that with their need to fill air time, news of outrage and terrible things have to be basically created from nothing, and sometimes from less than that. One person makes some comment. It is then taken out of context and twisted and then anchors around the country can get all up in a tivy and demand apologies from everyone and their mother. The newest example of this is based on a Wesley Clark statement. You need to just watch the video which plays his original comment, and then shows the media reaction to it. The media was trying to say we should be outraged by him, but in fact I found myself quite mad at them for completely misleading the American people. The condensed version of the video is that Wesley Clark, who is a retired general, actually praised McCain’s military service, but then, correctly in my mind, said that his military service is not automatically a qualification for being president. From this, we see anchor after anchor wondering, “How dare Clark belittle McCain’s service to the country?” To top this off, they then try to push this outrange on do Obama. Why is it that presidential candidates are now responsible for any and everything their supporters say? Clark is in no way connected with the Obama campaign, and there is no reason for his comments to be connected with Obama, as Clark himself said in his response.
Now that I have thought about it, I have seen this sort of political situation before. The race for American president has almost completely devolved to the level of high school class president elections. We have been divided into our cliches by the media so we can do our voting as a group. We just have older women, and middle class white men, and southern evangelicals instead of jocks, and nerds, and goths. And we are doing our best to ignore actual issues and instead go with the basis of class elections where all we hear is “I totally heard from the girlfriend of my best friends brother, that candidate A said that blah blah blah.”
May the most popular guy with the least controversal supporters win.
Ok, so here is a political one just for all you people in South Carolina (and everyone else in the US). The Supreme Court has the sole purpose of making sure that laws passed by congress are legal and sound as defined by the Constitution. They recently did their job in overturning a part of the Military Commissions Act and the Detainee Treatment Act, in which the right of Habeas Corpus was taken from anyone the state deemed an enemy combatant. At the moment, that term specifically applies to various individuals being held at Guatanamo Bay because of presumed association with Al Queda. It is important to note though, that nothing is keeping them from expanding who that applied to, including American citizens.
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I can no longer claim a preference for either of our countries political parties. The truth of the matter is that by and large they are identical is so many ways, and different is so few ways that it no longer matters. They are separate only because of the blind ignorant loyalty of the American masses. They are a facade of competition in order to sell advertisement during news television and in newspapers.
If we abandon loyalty to an established political party, we must look to the individuals, their ideas, their merits, and decide on the best individual. That certainly does not guaruntee that we will agree with all of their ideas and beliefs, but that is the way of things. With that in mind, if you haven’t heard Barrach Obama’s recent speech on race issues in our country, do yourself a favor and listen to it. It is, all around, a brilliant speech. Here is an actual presidental candidate who is not only actually standing up for a change from our current failing situation, but who is intelligent enough to bring the country together and lead. Did I mention that this speech is completely the work of Obama? This was not created by a committee of writers with the polls in one hand and a thesaurus in the other. It was the result of a single politician alone for two and a half days articulately writing his actual thoughts and opinions. When was the last time a president gave a major speech without the help of a writer? Nixon in 1969.
So I am feeling pretty political so I think that perhaps I will run a series of post on the topic. To start off, here is story that is written as outlandish predictions for the new year. The only problem is that they only sound outlandish until you realize that each is linked to an actual news story from the past year. You might recall that your high school teacher told you that you read classics and take history is that what happened before will happen again. Well go ahead and start pulling out your old copies of 1984, A Brave New World, and russion history textbook.